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An anonymous reader writes ""The Web Standards Project has announced the release of Acid3, the latest test designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards in browsers. 'By making sure their software adheres to the test, the creators of these products can be more confident that their software will display and function with Web pages correctly both now and with Web pages of the future. The Acid3 Test is designed to test specifications for Web 2.0, and exposes potential flaws in implementations of the public ECMAScript 262 and W3C Document Object Model 2 standards.' Screenshots at the Drunken Fist site show the success of Safari 3 (which originally scored 31, but is now Scoring 87/100) IE6, and IE7 (massive fail, of course)'." There are additional discussions of the new test happening around the web.

The test is screwed up again, probably because so many people are rushing to test IE8 in it. No browser passes Acid2 from the original site at this time. IE8 passes Acid2 mirrors, like the other browsers.

If they actually implemented the standards well, they wouldn't have to worry about specific tests, they would just do well on them by default. Now I don't think that any browser does 100% on Acid 3, but I think a lot of them do fairly well.

If they actually implemented the standards well, they wouldn't have to worry about specific tests, they would just do well on them by default.

Have you ever tried reading the HTML/CSS specs? They're huge and often vaguely worded. There were often sections that just weren't intuitive, and the only real approach to implementing them was to just figure out what other browser did and copy it. The specs were created by people who have no intention of implementing them themselves, and it really shows.

Good point. Running now gets me a 90 with the webkit nightly, and examining the earlier failure shows at least one test (69) which explicitly states may be a networking issue- something that seems highly likely given how overloaded the acid3 server was earlier in the day.

I was wondering the same thing. Isn't it FF3 that just began rendering ACID2 correctly?Besides, I see these as a process or goal -- giving the browser makers something concrete and visual to shoot for, as well as an easy way for users to judge the quality of their browser of choice. If the thing was just released, I'm not really surprised that many of the browsers don't pass it completely. Now a year or two from now is a different story, after the browser makers have had some time to address the issues the

Besides, I see these as a process or goal -- giving the browser makers something concrete and visual to shoot for, as well as an easy way for users to judge the quality of their browser of choice.

Bullshit. The Acid tests have become the SAT's of the browser world. People *think* it's a measure of how standards compliant your browser is, but all it *really* is, is a measure of how well your browser does on the acid test.

The test consists largely of 100 JavaScript tests designed to throw an assertion on failure and return a certain value on pass. The score is how many of the tests out of 100 pass. You can see which tests failed by clicking or shift-clicking the A in Acid3 after the test completes. In the sense that each test can relatively independently pass or fail (although some tests depend on previous tests), yes, it is a quantitative test.

The other part of the test is rendering the Acid3 text with shadow and the colored rectangles. By seeing how the Acid3 test fails in many other browsers, you can see that it can also render X, Fail, and a picture of a cat on failure of some rendering tests, typically in red so they stand out.

3b3 gets a 61. Opera 9.5 is the best I tested at 65. Safarai 3.0.4 for Windows got a 39. IE7 got a 12 and also managed to mangle the page the most.

Your numbers are quite different than mine. I scripted all the browsers/OS's I had handy from the sunspider javascript test last week and ran them on Acid3. The results are here [slashdot.org].

Where do you get a nightly of Opera? I ran the beta version they have up tonight and got 59/100 on OS X and it crashed on Linux and Windows XP. In any case, the best number I got was Safari 3.0.4 with a week old nightly of Webkit on OS X, which got 86/100. The Firefox 3 beta also did well getting 67/100 on OS X and Linux (but onl

NoscriptNukeAnything EnhancedRestarterShowIPIE TabGmail ManagerEbay Toolbar (the one those college kids made)DOM inspectorAll In One GesturesAdblock

I as well had to let noscript through on the site and then refresh.

options:

advanced tab:advanced encryption - SSL3 and TLS 1 checkedsecurity tab: warn about addonssite forgery - using downloaded listremember passwords (my own preference ofc, I only use it for ones I can afford to compromise)

Not bad. Unfortunately I couldn't get the webkit nightly to load the page, probably for unrelated reasons. The latest trunk build of Firefox gets 66, which is an improvement from 61 in Firefox 3 Beta 3.

I got it to load twice in the latest nightly of WebKit just now and scored 85/100 both times. That's pretty impressive, in my opinion and one of the reasons I use WebKit as my primary browser these days.

Unfortunately, the server is still timing out when I try to view the reference image.

The Acid tests would be a lot more productive if they were oriented more towards the practical non-compliance issues than obscure ones. A back-asswards JavaScript implementation or a horrible box model is more of an issue than the inability to display base64 images encoded directly into the page markup. Total compliance is great, but it's much more pragmatic to get the fundamental issues fixed first.

than the inability to display base64 images encoded directly into the page markup

Trust me, that one could actually become fairly important, depending on how large the image could be. I've got scripts that produce reports where right now it takes several seconds of database grinding just to give me the table of data and then several seconds again when the browser hits the script in the <img> tag to get the graph, if I could calculate the table once and produce the graph at the same time and insert the

The Acid tests are not made to pat browser vendors on the back. They exist to show areas in the standards that still aren't covered well. Browsers should fail when the test is first released. that shows that the people making the tests have done their job right by covering areas that are still spotty when it comes to implementation.Of course, there's the fact that the browser which made Web standards famous will be the very last non-IE browser to pass Acid2, despite having had over two years to fix the issu

Someone again try to explain to me the definition of web 2.0, and don't tell me flash.

I personally think it's the move of the entire web (the content that matters) to valid XHTML, CSS, etc (of course everything is controlled dynamically by PHP/Perl/whatever you want). I also hope there can be an open standard soon to do the same functionality that Youtube's Flash container that runs on everything and that everyone agrees upon. Silverlight is obviously closed and so is Flash. We need an open source mid-quality (and high-quality) video player that loads quickly and is OS-independent, just like Flash. I think that is all that is missing in this 'Web 2.0'.

I refer to Web 2.0 as user generated content. I define user generated content pretty broadly as well. This isn't just YouTube videos and MySpace pages. This is the ability of the user to use the web to dynamically create content on the web, whether it's uploading a video to a public site, creating their own web profile, or typing a research paper using a browser based word processor. The user has the ability to go to a web site and then

Srsly, tho.. Web2.0 is (supposedly) about cutting out the page refresh in between client actions and content updates. AJAX, SOAP, etc. are obvious examples. Of course, i've heard all types of other descriptions, to the extent that i'm no longer sure of that definition, as inaccessible to the public as the idea was anyway.

As for the movie player, it's not a particularly good idea to write something like that in a serverside-rendered language.. i guess it'd be possible to wri

They don't. They read through their spec carefully and presumably do it by hand. I believe with the first ACID test their was a bug with the reference image that was reported by someone implementing a browser.

Is if there was a way to not only get a copy of the acid test fails, but a quick list of which browsers fail which test and what that should mean. So that us legions of OS coders or even Mozilla, Opera, or Safari's own guys could get busy and fix it in their next releases.

Perhaps, I am missing the point of these acid tests. I'm not a web developer by trade, so I don't claim to be an expert on CSS. From personal experience, CSS has allowed me to use much less complex HTML in the little web publishing I have done. I never seem to get consistent results when I test my pages in different browsers. I hope that these "standards" Acid tests lead to greater compatibility across browsers.

Do these tests increase compatibility by pushing the envelope on new standards, or are they just a browser-war pissing contest?

If these acid tests are based on standards. Why is the only acid test that passes the W3C validator, the Acid 1 test?

Because more recent Web standards include sections on how certain kinds of errors are supposed to be handled. These need to be tested just like everything else, but up until Acid2 many browsers weren't very good about that.

Remember, the point of Acid tests is to be a thorn in browser developers' sides: find areas of the standard that no one currently does well and test for them. Browsers shouldn't pass Acid tests when the tests first come out: that would be missing the point of the tests in the first place.

Yes, biased towards conforming with open international published standards, rather than to any specific vendor's implementation. It just happens the best of the best web browsers try to conform to the same standards, scoring much higher than Microsoft's offering which is deliberately designed to break from the standard to ensure lockin.

Not quite. When none of the browsers are getting 100/100 and the only browser to get over a 60 is a safari beta, I think it's safe to say that it's a test designed so that every browser will fail. That's the point: they're giving solid targets to browser developers and giving a concise score to everyone else so that they know where the browsers stand in the next generation of web tech.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that complaining about it being designed so that IE would fail is like saying that American Gladiators was designed so that my 8 year old brother would fail. Sure, it has that effect in the end, but the fact that he's under-equipped for such a competition isn't American Gladiators' fault.

I think the mere fact that American Gladiators is considered tv-worthy indicates that we, as a nation, have failed. Also, sorry about your brother. That was really brutal when they knocked him into the pool.

Yes, there is almost no correlation between how well a browser does on Acid tests and how well it renders pages on the web. The purpose of the Acid tests is to break the chicken-and-egg problem of web development. The web developers tend not to use features unless all popular browsers support them. On the other hand, the developers of the web browsers tend not to add features that are not used by web developers. Without anyone willing to go first, the implementation and use of new web standards stalls.

The purpose of the Acid tests is to break this logjam by using these new standards in a very public way so that web developers will be motivated to implement them. The "my browser does better than your browser" posturing is a bit immature, but as a side effect it popularizes the faults of browsers and motivates the browser developers to fix them. Then, the web developers use the new features after they are well supported.

The ideal here actually is that if a reasonable number of mainstream browsers scored 100 on the test, web developers could use all of the features the test exercises and have a reasonable expectation that their page will display correctly for end users.The test is about making life better for web developers, and about making the web more interoperable, instead of having sites which jump through browser predicated hoops, or restrict users to "IE7.0 or newer on 32-bit Windows" or the like. Thus having your fa

You're exactly correct that the Acid tests test specific browser flaws. They are testing exactly the flaws that plague web developers. That way, when all popular browsers pass the Acid tests, web developers don't need to work around the flaws in each different browser. We all benefit by getting web sites with fancy new features that work in all browsers. The scores are not meaningful, but are a way to motivate the developers of web browsers to fix their flaws so they're not embarrassed by a low or non-passing score.

When was Opera ever standards king? Before Opera 7 I couldn't use Opera because it couldn't reflow web pages correctly to handle DHTML. The Mozilla and IE of the day could handle reflow just fine. I couldn't use Opera 8 because it didn't support XSLT, and one website that I frequented used XSLT. The IE and Firefox of the day could handle XSLT just fine. Opera's got good standards support, generally about as good as Firefox or Safari, but it seems like it's often playing catch-up in at least one area. But st